This Woman Holds the Reins, Not the Flag, at Formula One Team

There is nothing inherent to auto racing that means it has to be one of the world’s most macho sports. Women drive road cars as much as men do, after all. But racing has few women drivers or team managers. Women mostly serve as beautiful flag holders on the grid, press attachés or hostesses.

But last month, in what could constitute the first rumbling of a revolution, the Sauber Formula One team announced that it had appointed a woman, Monisha Kaltenborn, as the team principal, the team’s top director.

A team principal in Formula One not only runs the team at its headquarters, but attends most of the races and works with the other team directors to talk about the future direction of the sport technically, financially and on the track. The team principal also negotiates agreements with the commercial-rights holder and the International Automobile Federation, the sport’s governing body.

For Kaltenborn, 41, an Austrian lawyer of Indian birth, the latest move is just another step on a path she began following a dozen years ago, when she joined the Sauber team as head of the legal department. Since 2010, she has been chief executive of the team, and earlier this year acquired a percentage of the ownership. During that time, she has also given birth to and been raising two children with her husband. As team principal, however, she sees herself as a team director first, a woman second.

“The fact that I am a woman is just a given fact,” she said. “I don’t want to change it and cannot change it. And it is also good if you are seen as a woman that you don’t need to hide and be more male in your approach, because that just would be the wrong approach.”

But the racing world has not been an easy one for her to navigate. A former team director, Eddie Jordan, once called the small group of Formula One team principals “the piranha club,” for its cutthroat competition and back-stabbing. Kaltenborn said that even after a year of attending team principal meetings with Peter Sauber, the team founder, who has just handed his job to her, one of the other team principals still thought she was Sauber’s interpreter.

Formula One drivers, however, appear to be more open to the idea.

“I think it’s great — why not?” said Mark Webber, a driver at the Red Bull team. “We have very successful businesswomen around the world, so there’s absolutely no reason why she cannot run a successful racing team. Some of the qualities that females have in terms of making decisions faster than a room full of men might be a positive thing. I look forward to seeing how she goes.”

Kaltenborn was born in India to Indian parents, and spent her first eight years there, until her family moved to Vienna. She went on to complete a law degree at the University of Vienna in 1995 and then a masters’ degree in international law at the London School of Economics in 1996. She has Austrian, but not Indian, citizenship.

She worked in a couple of law firms before joining the Fritz Kaiser Group, a wealth management company, which owned shares in the Sauber team, in 1998. There, she worked on the team’s legal and corporate affairs. After Fritz Kaiser sold its shares, she joined the team in 2000, heading the legal department. That entailed writing contracts for sponsors, drivers and suppliers and handling relations with racing authorities.

Photo

The Indian-born Austrian lawyer Monisha Kaltenborn, the new principal for the Sauber team, where she has worked since 2000. She replaces Peter Sauber, the team’s founder.Credit
Woohae Cho/Reuters

Although she had no initial interest in racing, she said that she has now been bitten by the bug. In the autumn of 2010, she replaced Peter Sauber on the pit wall stand for the first time, during the Japanese Grand Prix. She now attends most of the races and sits on the pit wall, and discusses team strategy with the team managers and engineers.

Her role in Sauber’s management followed the withdrawal in 2009 of BMW, which had owned the team for four years. Peter Sauber, who had all but retired from the team he had founded four decades earlier, then returned as team principal. But he had long said he didn’t want to stay in the job into his 70s. He is 69.

Of the woman he chose to succeed him, Sauber said, “She is able to make quick decisions and the right decisions, and the same goes for managing the company.”

But Kaltenborn is left with a team that, while it has had excellent results this year, is not among the top teams and raising finances is more difficult than ever. She thinks the stability that her appointment represents could be a positive point to attract sponsors, and she believes that her gender could have some advantages in racing management.

“I think where the biggest difference lies,” she said, “is that a woman will see motor sports and the activities we do — the technical side of the team — maybe more pragmatically, more distantly, and say: ‘This is an activity like any other activity, it is just what we do. We could be doing something else.’ So we don’t attach so much of this emotion to fast cars and racing. It doesn’t mean you are less passionate about it. I think women are very passionate about what they do and really fight for it in their own way.”

“And that is where I think it may be an advantage to get people together to a table,” she added, “to give them the feeling that this is not about who can present it in the most emotional way and try to sell themselves better.”

She said that her husband and children, who are 10 and 7 years old, are supportive of her career, but that things are also different for a woman doing a job like this, which requires so much travel.

“I think that is something that you have to accept as a woman — that you have to have every other member in the family having to be happy, then you can do what you do,” she said.

Kaltenborn said the cutting-edge, high-tech world of Formula One is not unlike that of her youthful ambition, which was to be an astronaut. She gave up that idea because she did not want to move to the United States or Russia. But she thinks that instead of pioneering in space, she may be doing so in auto racing.

“This will bring in a change, I think, slowly,” she said. “If you write that a first woman is doing it, then a second one will come in, and then a third one will come, and you will soon have a situation where it just will not make an issue.”